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Over its first year in business, Range Media Partners’ boutique publishing firm Range Literary Publishing has been quietly working with talent to build out its debut
slate. On Tuesday, RLP celebrated with a very big announcement: the release of a book sequel to “Donnie Darko” from filmmaker Richard Kelly.
It’s a bold first novel project that perfectly exemplifies RLP’s mission: supporting Range’s new and existing talent in the publishing business while identifying projects with strong potential for adaptation in film and TV.
“What it came from was the idea, the reality that so many of the artists that we all love, regardless of medium that they’re working in, a lot of them want to write books,” Range Literary Publishing chief Jeff Speich tells Variety of launching Range’s publishing arm last year. “I use the term innovation loosely because I don’t think of myself as someone like that. But I will say that the innovative thought that I had in the middle of the night a long time ago was the notion of linking a real publishing house with a production and management company. We are the only one that has that capability. Certain other companies have relationships, of course, with big publishers and have had those kinds of relationships. But what I thought would be interesting would be the idea of we’re actually the publisher. We are in house doing that on behalf of not just clients but non-clients in a way that is really geared toward the author and the artist.”
Led by CAA vet Speich, the boutique, author-forward imprint is working across genres including memoir, fiction, non-fiction, and children’s books.
Speich spent over a decade at CAA before launching The Channel Road, a holding company whose portfolio includes two healthcare companies as well as a wellness-focused publisher. Now, he wants to simplify the intricacies of the publishing business for Hollywood talent and give Range the advantage of an early look at novels and nonfiction titles ripe for adaptation.
“At Range Literary Publishing, we focus on bringing an author’s vision to life through a curated experience,” Speich says. “Whether we are assisting with the creative process or managing publishing logistics, our commitment to high-quality storytelling remains the same. We work with both debut and established authors to ensure their work is published at the highest level.”
In its infancy last December, RLP partnered to release a limited special edition of graphic novel “HYDE” by Jesse Negron, Johnny Depp and Ridley Scott, a reimagining inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” With learnings from that early project, in mind, Range recently launched Range Comics (RC) under RLP to specialize in comics and graphic novels.
Earlier this month, RC published Shaboozey’s “The Outlaw Cherie Lee,” his first comic book and the first issue of a three-part Western series, which expands the story from his album “The Outlaw Cherie Lee & Other Western Tales.”
“Shaboozey wrote a beautiful story. It was a screenplay and he obviously was recording an album and it’s a wonderful you know very successful concept album that was telling the story and we started talking very early about, as a visual medium, a comic would make sense to tell this story,” Speich says. “The album just dropped, but simultaneously around all of this, our film group has been having conversations about how to package that and put that together, and so all of those things were kind of happening on top of each other.”
Speich says RLP is looking to work in whatever direction a client needs: “In some cases, there are projects that may already be a film, and the director may come to us and say, it would be very interesting for us to explore a little bit further these sets of characters in the film. We’d like to use that — this is you know just an example — as an extension of the IP, as opposed to the jumping-off point. Because in some cases, the film is already shot, the film is already in the can, and how do we use our capabilities and bring those to bear to bring the artistic vision to the audience?”
In addition to the “Donnie Darko” sequel “The Philosophy of Time Travel,” which is set to debut in Q4, RLP will soon publish “Kenan and Kel Meet Zombies,” the first in a series of “Kenan and Kel Meet …” graphic novels.
RLP’s 2027 slate includes “Burnout,” a debut novel from Range founding partner and former CAA agent Michael Cooper (which is in early development as a film adaptation at Range Studios); illustrated children’s book “The Grove of Lost Things” from Gabe Basso; children’s book “Big Love, Little Love” by M. Night Shyamalan’s wife, Bhavna Shyamalan; lifestyle/coffee book “How We Host” by Akilah Releford Gould; and thriller novel “Temples of Iron” by Mark DeFriest.
During its first year in business, RLP struck a worldwide distribution partnership with the Ingram Content Group-owned publisher Two Rivers. Founded in 1999 and rebranded as Two Rivers in 2017, the New York-based publishing service coordinates direct sales relationships with more than 40,000 retail accounts worldwide, backed by Ingram’s warehousing and distribution infrastructure and is the main distributor for Taschen, Harvard Business Review and Guinness World Book of Records.
“We’ve been working really hard for a year, but there’s an excitement that comes with ‘Donnie’ being the first book out of the gate,” Speich says. “We’ve been working hard on that for months, and so we’re very excited to get that out in the world and keep going from there. I think all of the capabilities that Range offers overall, this is a great piece of that. And we continue to work on building more titles, more exciting books to announce.”
